What are Exchange Traded Funds and why are they having such an impact with investors?

How can you make ETFs work in your investment portfolio and what are the risks?

Exchange Traded Funds are an investing revolution that have challenged modern investment principles such as individual stock selection and the need to hire a fund manager. By tracking an index, focusing on themes and sectors and helping assess risk they are fast becoming a key investment vehicle.

The Financial Times Guide to Exchange Traded Fundsis a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to this new way of running an investment portfolio. It explains what index tracking  funds are, how they work, compares different fund types and provides a coherent investing master plan.   Proving that the best investment strategies really are based on easy to understand principles, The Financial Times Guide to Exchange Traded Funds: 

·        Shows you how to use ETFs, what to watch out for and advises on the very real risks

·        Suggests actual portfolios of mixed ETFs for you to start with

·        Gives you 25 essential indexes that you should be following

Exchange Traded Funds  (EFTs) are a rapidly-growing investment strategy, forcing the traditional mutual funds sector on to the back foot. ETFs are not a complicated idea  - it’s all about tracking the right index, working out the important  sectors, improving your  international diversification, investigating  alternative assets and assessing  the risk of the fund and the underlying index. 

The Financial Times Guide to Exchange Traded Funds covers:

• A Quick Primer on the Theory

• Structuring the Revolution

• Investing In Commodities Using Index Funds

• The Notty Gritty By ETF journalist Paul Amery

• The New Fundamental Indexing Revolution by fund manager Rob Davies

• On Portfolios by financial planner James Norton

• Big Theme Investing And Index Funds by Dr Stephen Barber

• Active Portfolios Using ETFs by analysts Tarquin Coe And Mark Glowrey

• Putting It All Together

• The Master Portfolios

• The Essential 25

• List of All London Listed Etfs

• Major Index Returns

Using index tracking  Exchange Traded Funds will change your investing behaviour and change it for the better.

About the authors

David Stevenson is a columnist for the Financial Times Weekend edition, and authors the Adventurous Investor section where he writes about everything from investing in Mongolia through to using ETFs in your portfolio. He’s also a columnist for the Investors Chronicle (based around his SIPP) and before that was a columnist for Citywire. David writes extensively about ETFs for the FT and has developed a series of Master Portfolios that make use of index tracking funds  for the Investors Chronicle .